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January 4: Work Week
Logged in for my first work day of semi-retirement. As far as I can tell, my team has largely been handling things in my absence. Yay! They did have a few things to ask me to help with; nothing onerous. Day was pretty mellow, with enough to keep me occupied but not so much that I felt rushed. Although one of my co-workers did ask for something just as I was getting ready to log out. I dithered for a moment and then told her I was logging out. She wanted me to do the review on her query, and anyone can do a review so didn't sound like it was important for me specifically to do it.
The nice part about having told my boss several years ago that I was planning to retire "in the next few years" is that I've had an easy answer to the "what do you want to do in the future?"
"Retire."
I remember having one conversation with my previous boss where I literally said, "My career goal is to become expendable and then, at long last, to be expended." Somehow or other, I've been regarded as indispensable in my position for actual decades, notwithstanding that my position has changed multiple times over that period. I'd get moved from one thing that I was good at to a different thing that also suited my temperament, time and again. My career became laser-focused on "work tasks I enjoy and have accordingly gotten really good at doing." But I still didn't want to work at a day job for the rest of my life. Not even until I was retirement age.
It's good to be here now. I want my workplace and my team to flourish when I'm gone, and I'm not 100% confident that there aren't still things that I can do much better than anyone else on the team. But eh. They'll be fine.
It's nice that this isn't really my problem anymore. Do my best for seven hours out of the week and then forget about it for another week.
One perk of working one day a week is that my seven hours of work don't take much more than seven hours of my time. When I worked consecutive days in a row, the evening between workdays in particular always felt constrained: free time, but not as useful as free time before a day off, or on a day off. Even working two non-consecutive days still had some of that halo effect, where the need to work at a certain time or to recover from having worked made the time surrounding work less constructive and enjoyable. There's still some of that -- I didn't feel much like writing or drawing after I got off work today.
But I've done other useful things. I exercised and stretched. I skipped napping (despite not getting my usual 8.5 hours of sleep last night). I put together a stuffed French toast casserole to bake for breakfast tomorrow (this was quite a production! Took most of an hour. Reminds me of making lasagna. I should make lasagna again, it's been a while.) I loaded and ran the dishwasher. And I wrote about my day!
It's been a good day. Not as good as the days when I don't work. I have not yet achieved "yay! I get to work today!" which I genuinely hope to accomplish at some point -- being actually excited to do my day job. It's mostly "eh, it's fine" instead. Although there are parts of my job that I enjoy doing, they don't make up enough of my day to have me looking forward to it. YET.
I am looking forward to going to sleep in a little bit, though. Good night, Dreamwidth.
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*chinhands*
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aw YEAH \o/
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Yeah, I never wanted to move into management and business is weirdly focused around that. Explaining over and over that I didn't want to be promoted into a position of telling other people what they wanted to do was annoying. :D
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Thank you!